Only the Young
by LadySilver
Summary: Erica and Boyd ran away from Beacon Hills in search of a new life. Just when they think they can't go any farther, a chance to help someone leads them to the place that neither of them knew they were running to. Post-season 2 AU.


_A/N: I originally intended this as a gift for everyone for the Teen Wolf Holidays exchange. My attempts to post it as such failed, so I'm releasing it into the wild. It's still a gift for everyone. As always, questions, comments, concrit, and squee are all appreciated. Thank you for reading, and Happy Holidays._

**Only the Young**

by LadySilver

The romance of running away quickly turned to hard reality. Days on the run found Erica and Boyd down to their last scraps of cash, hungry, and tired. Though they'd been sticking to back roads and wooded trails in hopes of minimizing their contact with people, a slow, cold rain drove them into the nearest town.

It wasn't much: a cluster of false-fronted buildings on a derelict street. Once bright colors had faded to peeling strips of gray. Windows were dark, boarded over, most of the town's population asleep or moved on, save for the few who clung desperately to their memories of what the place used to be.

They found a still-open diner stuck in the corner of an abandoned department store. The lone bright lights and yeasty scent of baked goods overrode any inhibitions about staying unseen, and the promise of warmth and the chance to pretend for a little while that they were just two teens doing teenage things had Erica's hand on the door before Boyd could protest.

Erica pulled Boyd inside, and dragged them to a booth near the back. Its vinyl was ripped and patched, the table scored with the scratch marks of patrons past leaving their name and proof of their existence.

The waitress came right over as soon as they were seated. She was a thick-set woman of East Asian descent with her black hair cut short and spiky. Her order pad was out, pen poised, and the habitual greeting of "Hi, my name is Stephanie. What can I get you tonight?" rattled off before she looked at the teens seated before her.

Her eyes widened as she took in their bedraggled appearance and bone-weary expressions, then softened. "Hang on," she said. "I know what you two need to get started." She stepped back into the kitchen and emerged a moment later with a coffee pot, cups, and two small bowls of salad.

The lettuce had a brown tinge around its edges and the onion brought tears to Erica's eyes from ten feet away. It was more food than Erica had seen at one time in days. If her stomach hadn't given up protesting its hunger, it would have growled.

"It's included with whatever you order," Stephanie said. She set the items down, poured out the coffee. "Don't mind me asking," she went on, "but are you two runaways? You look like runaways."

Erica stared back at her in shocked silence, her fingers tightening into the cold vinyl seat. She fumbled for a better explanation, but there really wasn't one. Two kids their age, looking like they did, in the kind of town that people fought to leave, not to visit, and everyone in the room knew that there was really only one conclusion.

"We're just taking some time to get things figured out," Boyd supplied, far more polite in the face of the unwarranted nosiness than anyone should be. He dumped the little container of salad dressing over the leaves and speared a forkful, shoving it into his mouth with a determination that belied his earlier assurances of not being all that hungry.

Erica looked forlornly at her little bowl and thought about shoving the whole thing Boyd's direction, not that he would accept it. Still, he was so much bigger than she was and that meant that he needed more food to sustain him. While they had hunted, neither hunger nor werewolf instincts had been enough to quell their ingrained revulsion about killing living animals. The screams of the last rabbit Erica had cornered still made her shudder.

Stephanie hovered at the table for a long moment, watching them. She took in Erica's smudged face and dirty clothes, and clicked her tongue softly. "Are you pregnant?" she blurted out.

Stunned at the directness and brazenness of the question, it was all Erica could do to shake her head no.

"Kids like you, that's usually the story," she continued, more to herself than to them. "Either that or drugs. You on drugs?"

Again, Erica shook her head. Boyd turned his "Are you kidding me?" expression on the waitress. Anyone else would have backed down; she didn't seem to notice, so deep in her own analysis that she might have forgotten that she was talking to real people.

"Well, if you don't mind me saying," she started, "you're not going to solve your problems as long as you keep letting 'em haunt you..." Boyd raised an eyebrow at her, clearly unimpressed with her nosiness and insistence on giving advice when none had been asked for. Finally seeming to get the message, she shrugged, "Voice of experience, kids. It's hard to watch people make the same mistakes you did. Let me see what I can do for you." She turned away, heading back to the kitchen without even handing Boyd or Erica a menu.

The bowl empty before she was done with it, Erica set her fork down. This is what their life had become: running, never enough to eat. She touched the tangled mat of her long hair and couldn't remember when she'd last been able to wash it, couldn't predict when she'd be able to wash it. How easy it had been to take hot showers and shampoo and conditioner for granted. How easy it had been to take _everything _for granted.

_We could always go back, _she thought to herself, testing the words in her mind before trying them on her lips. She didn't really want to go back. Didn't think they had much to go back to. It's not like anyone back in Beacon Hills was going to miss them—assuming anyone back in Beacon Hills was still alive. "We could..." she started to say. She stopped, tried to line the words up again, opened her mouth.

"I don't want to go back," she blurted out. Her words sounded loud against the empty silence.

A radio came on suddenly, pumping bouncy 50s music over the speakers. Erica's eyes darted up to the speaker and then over to the waitress who was working in the kitchen with her back turned to them. Was the timing of the music a coincidence?

Lowering her voice, she added, "Going back feels too much like giving up."

Boyd listened to her the way he always did, with an intensity and attention to everything she meant and not just the words she said, and nodded sagely, like he had expected no other announcement.

She rushed to explain, feeling like she needed to. "My whole life, I've never left Beacon County," Erica confessed. "I mean, not in any way that matters. I've been to doctors offices and hospitals all over the state, but I've never been to Disneyland."

"Not everyone goes to Disneyland," Boyd pointed out, his voice sombre, just stating a fact. "I ain't been."

"God, I'm sorry," Erica responded. The simple metric by which she gauged what it meant to be a normal Californian kid, by which she had gauged the inadequacy of her own life and opportunities, and using it now made her feel like a whiny brat. "I didn't mean it that way. It's just...Now that I finally can go places without having to think about medicine and where the nearest hospital is and whether someone might think it's cool to put a strobe light in their front yard, I want to. I want to take some time to _live_. I want to see the world." She traced one of the signatures carved into the table and wondered where the person was now and if the marks on the table had given his life more meaning.

Boyd's understanding smile disarmed her."It's OK. I don't want to go back, either." He set his fork down and wiped his lips with the paper napkin. "I feel like we were meant to be here." Though he dropped into silence again, Erica could tell that he wasn't done with his thoughts.

Through the open window into the kitchen, they watched the waitress moving around, charged with the task of cooking the food as well as serving it. Soon the smell of frying meat wafted over them, and this time Erica's stomach did let out a low rumble.

The song ended and a more melancholy one started, the singer crooning about those who had been lost.

Boyd mouthed a few of the words, then sighed long and deeply. "After Alicia disappeared, my daddy crawled into a bottle. He didn't stay there long, maybe a year. One day he came home, dumped all the liquor down the drain, and he hasn't touched a drop since."

Erica nodded, encouraging him to go on. This was the most open Boyd had ever been about his past, and here it was happening at a hole-in-the-wall diner in a small town whose name she couldn't even remember.

"My mama, though, she crawled into her Bible and she tried real hard to take me and Daddy with her." He frowned and picked at the edge of the napkin. "She wanted so hard to believe that Alicia going away had a reason. That something better was gonna come out of it." Outside the rain had stopped and the clouds were beginning to dissipate. Boyd stared through the rain-spattered window as the first sparks of stars appeared like marks on a map that no one could follow.

"All the hours she spent on her knees at church and all the money she threw in that basket, and she never did find her reason." When he turned back to look at her, his brown eyes glistened with emotion. "What if the Bite was the reason?"

Erica cocked her head. "You really think your sister got kidnapped so you could become a werewolf?" The tactlessness of the question brought a grimace and embarrassed flush to her face.

He was interrupted before he could answer. From the kitchen came the waitress's voice, charged with fear.

"...well, where was the last place you seen him?" she demanded. She had her cellphone pressed tight to her ear, her other arm hooked around her head as if to shield herself from eavesdroppers. It was an unnecessary consideration. Since she was in the back of the kitchen, only those with werewolf hearing would have been able to hear her over the radio and the sizzle of the grill top. Anyone could see her, though, if they thought to look through the order window. "How long you say he's been gone?"

Boyd held up a finger, hushing Erica. Not that he needed to. Despite all the other sounds, Erica found that with a little concentration, she was able to hear the voice on the other end of the call. It was a teenage girl's voice, high-pitched and frantic. She had put the waitress's son to bed at his usual time. When she'd checked on him a few minutes later, he was gone. She thought he was playing a game or had sneaked out the window, but when she looked for him, she couldn't find him. "I looked everywhere," she insisted, over and over. "I looked under the bed and in the closets. I even went out back, but I didn't see nothing!" She wanted to know if she should call the police.

"Calm down," Stephanie answered, though the pallor of her skin and the strength of her grip around the phone proved that she was anything but calm herself. "Give me a second to think..."

Erica pulled the last of their money out of her pocket and dropped it on the table. The coins made a dull, inadequate clink against the hard surface. She looked at the rumpled bills and dirty coins, tried not to sum up how much they represented, and then took in the coffee cups and empty salad bowls. The aroma of frying meat from the kitchen promised yet more food that they couldn't afford, that they so desperately needed. Erica leaned across the table and captured Boyd's hand in hers. "Let's find him," she suggested. "We can probably do that faster than the police."

"He's probably not missing," Boyd answered. "He's a kid; he's probably playing hide-and-seek and the sitter just hasn't found him yet."

"Could be," Erica conceded, though her gut told her otherwise. No sitter would call the parent and admit to losing their child unless she'd exhausted all other possibilities; that was the fastest way to never work as a babysitter again. "It could be a false alarm, but what if it isn't?" She couldn't help the excitement that crept into her tone.

Boyd glanced toward the kitchen. Stephanie was still on the phone. Her heart raced, its pounding loud to them over the beat of the music.

"Call Matt. He'll know what to do. I'll be home as soon as I can. They got me on alone tonight, so I gotta find someone else to cover me. Let me make a few calls." She hung up and pressed her forehead against the kitchen wall, a sob wrenching itself from her throat.

"She won't find anyone, this time of night," Erica stated.

"I know." Boyd stood up and dropped the shredded remains of his napkin on the table. "We better make this fast, then. We can't let the police catch us, and you know that sitter is on the phone with them right now."

Erica nodded, knowing as well as he did what the dangers involved were. Best case, the two of them would get processed and shipped back to Beacon Hills like the runaways they were. She didn't want to think about what the worst case could be. Invigorated by something other than fear for the first time in weeks, Erica slipped from the booth.

Boyd stalled her, his pragmatism putting the first real damper on their mission. "We don't know anything about him," he pointed out. "We don't know how old he is or what he looks like. We don't know where they live."

"I've got this," she said, with a firm nod of confidence that she wasn't sure she felt.

Stephanie saw her approach and emerged red-eyed and drawn-faced from the kitchen. She stood, stiff-armed, behind the counter, unable to even summon the script of her job. Underneath her blue apron, her black slacks and white shirt looked wilted.

Erica smiled her most guileless smile, the one she'd perfected during years of hospital stays to get the nurses to bring her an extra cup of pudding or to let her sit in the waiting room watching TV after the other kids had to go to bed. "I overheard you on the phone. Is...everything OK?"

"Yes." The answer came quickly, robotically. Stephanie swiped a hand over her eyes, further smearing her mascara. She squeezed her eyes shut, blew out a breath. "No. My son is missing." She slapped her hands over her mouth, shocked at how her true feelings could slip out so easily. "God, I shouldn't be telling you this."

"It's OK," Erica soothed. She tried to imagine her own mother tear-stained and puffy, her clothes anything less than meticulously perfect because she couldn't worry about them more than her missing daughter.

Who was she kidding?

Her mother would be delighted to be free of worrying about Erica embarrassing her in public with yet another seizure, interrupting an important sales meeting with another ambulance ride to the hospital. Her father might miss her. Maybe. But he'd never say anything. If he had independent thoughts, he buried them all in stony silence and a thick wall of distance built between himself and his family. Neither of her parents knew that Erica was cured. Having her brain removed, sliced apart, and stitched back together would have made more sense to them than werewolves, and they had balked in disgust at the former.

"It's just...I might be able to help?" Erica suggested. She motioned between herself and Boyd. "_We _might be able to help."

"How?" Hope flared in Stephanie's eyes and immediately dimmed to doubt. But she didn't back away or reject the offer.

_It's probably better if you don't know, _Erica thought. She shrugged. "We might know a little something about getting lost." She waited, watched Stephanie work through her own deductions and options and assess the risk of trusting two teenage runaways. She could hear Boyd breathing, listening.

"My babysitter called the police," Stephanie answered, at last. "We don't have our own cops. Town's too small, you know. Matt—he's the county officer—will get here as soon as he can, but..." She trailed off, arms splaying in helplessness.

On silent feet, Boyd padded up to the counter. "Where would you son go?" he asked. His voice was calm, low. Erica leaned for a moment against the thick muscle of his arm, drawing on the comfort of his presence.

Stephanie shook her head. "He likes to play in the woods. He told me he has friends that live there."

"Friends?" Boyd echoed.

"Imaginary friends are normal for kids his age," Stephanie protested, crossing her arms defensively. "He's an only child. He's too young for school and I can't afford daycare. So, he spends a lot of time by himself. It's natural that he'd make up some playmates."

"I had imaginary friend when I was his age, too," Erica confessed. She saw Stephanie's guard ease, so she kept going. "Her name was Pumpkin Pie. She kept me company when I was sick." A doctor had told her parents that the imaginary friend might be a manifestation of brain damage or psychological trauma caused by the seizures, so Erica had quickly learned not to talk about her in front of them. She hadn't even thought about her in years.

An empathetic smile now on her face, Stephanie began ticking off her son's friends. "His are Ramón, Emily, Serena, Michael..." She frowned, her fingers still extended and waggled her thumb as if the movement would job her memory for the next name, and finally gave up with another shake of her head. "He had others when he was younger that he doesn't talk about anymore."

From next to her, a small voice chimed in, "They grew up. They got too old to play with us and had to go away."

Erica's head whipped over to the top of one of the bakery displays which had been bare a moment before. A young boy sat on it, sullenly kicking his legs. They made no noise as they bounced against the counter. He looked to be about four and on the small side, with fine bones and a pointed chin. His jeans and red t-shirt had the over-washed and ill-fitting look of hand-me-downs that had out-lived their time.

"Boyd," Erica said. His name came out strangled, barely a coherent syllable at all.

"I see," he answered, without so much as turning his head. Only the tensing of his arms gave away that he wasn't trying to placate her.

Stephanie followed where Erica was looking. Her frown deepened, new lines cutting deep shadows in her forehead and next to her eyes. "What do you see? Are you OK?"

Erica nodded slowly. Every supernatural sense she had screamed about the boy in question appearing out of nowhere. He looked real to her, solid. But the way Stephanie's eyes skipped over where her son sat brought home that he wasn't real to _her_. Erica sidled closer to the child, trying to disguise her movement in a nervous stretch so as not to draw more questions she couldn't answer.

In her short time as a werewolf, she'd learned hard and fast that the world had mysteries behind her ability to imagine. Without a doubt, she knew this boy was one of them.

She was just searching for an excuse to send Stephanie away when the waitress spun on her heel and dashed for the kitchen. "The burgers!"

In their conversation, none of them had noticed the sounds of sizzling meat flatten as the grease burned away nor the acrid scent as it began to burn.

Smoke now drifted from the charred lumps on the grill, filling the kitchen and seeping out into the main diner. Any second the fire alarm would begin to jangle.

Boyd grabbed one of the laminated menus from the holder next to the counter and followed Stephanie into the kitchen, waving it through the smoke as he went.

Erica stayed put for a moment, verifying Stephanie and Boyd's success in getting the situation under control. Seeing that they weren't going to need her help, and that they had successfully staved off the fire alarm, she closed the distance to the child.

He cast no shadow. He had no scent.

The overhead lights shone right through him.

Her stomach sank with the confirmation of what she was dealing with, and with her inability to keep the promise she'd made to his mother. Erica had acquired a lot of powers on becoming a werewolf; the ability to raise the dead was not one of them. How was she supposed to tell Stephanie that her son's ghost sat only feet away?

Even as she thought the word, she cocked her head and studied the figure more. To the best of her knowledge, she had never seen a ghost before, but something about this one struck her as unghostly. Aside from his insubstantiality, he looked so solid, like he really was there.

She reached for his leg and discovered that she couldn't get close enough to touch it. At first she likened the barrier to a force-field, then realized that her hand hadn't hit a barrier so much as it had lost interest. She couldn't touch him because, werewolf abilities aside, her mind refused to accept that there could be something to touch.

"Hi," she said with a small wave instead. "I'm Erica."

"Hi," the boy answered, then dropped into silence. He continued to swing his feet silently against the counter while he regarded her with the bald curiosity that only children could get away with. His brown eyes were intense, and so large on his tiny face.

She wondered how she looked to him, what he saw? Did he see the cold and hungry teenager that his mother had so quickly identified? Did he see a fellow adventurous spirit? Did he see the filth she felt caking her pores and saturating her clothes? Or did he see her for what she really was?

Erica touched her hair, picked a leaf out of a strand, and made a face of exaggerated shock like she was astonished to find leaves growing on her head. "The problem with long hair is that you get leaves stuck in it when you play in the woods," she told him. "Do you ever have that problem?"

"Noooo," he said, as if she'd made a ridiculous suggestion. "I have short hair, silly." He touched the top of his head and the short, black hair that stuck up on it. The cut was in that awkward transition point between lengths where no amount of combing or styling could make it look presentable. "I got burrs stuck in my hair one time and my mom had to cut them out, so then she shaved my head. Why don't you shave your head?"

She thought about how different her head would feel if she removed the weight of her hair. Their second day on the road, Boyd had commented that his shaved head made life without access to dependable hygiene so much easier, and the idea had crossed her mind more than once to emulate him. Each time she rejected it because she loved the long, blonde curls she'd invested in growing out even before she believed she had anything else in her looks to be proud of.

"I think I'd rather have a brush," she answered. "And maybe I should be more careful when I play in the woods. That's where you like to play with your friends, isn't it?" she asked, shifting the topic as deftly as she felt able. She could see Boyd helping Stephanie clean up the mess on the grill, and she didn't know how long he'd be able to keep her occupied.

The boy grinned, his feet stilled.

"Tell me about your friends," she suggested. "How do you find them when you want to play with them?"

The boy tipped his head in confusion, like the answer was so obvious that Erica should already know it. "They find me," he said. "They always know when I'm lonely."

"Are you lonely now?"

He kicked his foot once hard—silently—against the counter. "No! They told me I had to stay with them. I didn't want to stay with them. I wanted to see my mommy, so I yelled and yelled until they let me see my mommy." Only as he finished did he seem to realize that his mother hadn't acknowledged him. He turned toward her and in a plaintive whine called, "Mommy?"

Stephanie didn't hear him, didn't answer.

"She can't see you," Erica said.

"Why not?" The question was indignant, like his mother was being willfully stubborn in refusing to acknowledge him.

Erica shrugged. Somewhere she'd heard that ghosts didn't know they were dead. It might have been a movie, though it wasn't like she'd had any reason to differentiate fiction from fact in regards to the supernatural until a few months ago. "I can see you," she offered. It wasn't what he needed, but it was all she had.

"That's not the same thing," he argued.

"No," she agreed.

The boy thought about the problem, his face screwed into a tight scowl. "Are mommy's eyes broken?"

"Kind of," Erica answered. With that came a flash of insight about how to help him. "I have special eyes, though. They let me do magical things. Do you want to see them?"

The child nodded, his attention distracted from his plight with this promise of a novelty.

Erica moved in front of him so that her back was to the kitchen. Checking quickly that no one had entered the diner or was peering in from the outside, she let the wolf come into her eyes. In the night-backed glass window, she caught her reflection, muted and softened from the distance and the inadequacies of the mirror. She looked as substantial as the boy, save for her eyes which glowed real and yellow.

The boy gasped, slapped his hands over his face, then pulled them down slowly to take in her visage. "How did you do that?" He reached to touch her eyes. Like hers hand, his hand stopped before it found her skin. But there was second when she felt his faint warmth, _saw_ the infrared luminance of body heat. His pulse sussurated.

_He's alive_, she thought. Her own breath caught and very nearly came out a sob.

She bit her tongue to keep her observation to herself.

But she didn't need him to know. If the boy were alive, that meant maybe she could help him after all.

Letting her eyes fade back to brown, she answered, "It's a secret. Maybe I'll tell you one day. But here's the cool part: I can see all kinds of things that other people can't see." She grinned in a conspiratorial smile that sucked him right in. "I bet I can even see your friends. Do you think you can show me where you play with them?"

The boy studied her for a moment like he was trying to see through then trick he suspected. Finding none, he nodded and slid from the counter to land silently on his feet.

As if she were still speaking to the boy, Erica said, "Boyd, I'm leaving. I'll be back as soon as I can." She knew he would hear her. She also knew that he probably couldn't answer without drawing attention to himself, so she didn't wait.

Together, she and the child slipped from the diner and into the dark night.

The forest he led her to was different from what she expected. Beacon Hills Forest Preserve covered vast amounts of ground and had such a reputation for being dangerous that people rarely went there, especially at night. It was easy for the werewolves to live and hunt in that forest without being discovered, and it was just as easy for humans to wander through the trees and never see sign of anything supernatural.

By comparison, the copse behind the little house the waitress and her son lived in was scraggly and thin, like it had only been planted during Erica's lifetime. That anyone could get lost it in amazed her. She pushed past the thorny bushes that had grown up at the boundary of the trees and field and found herself alone among the overgrown foliage.

The boy had vanished.

She drew and exhaled a deep breath, scenting the air and sensing the titillation of the hidden moon on her skin.

Overhead, an owl hooted and from farther away she heard the trickle of a brook. Not too long ago, these noises would have terrified her, given her all the excuse she needed to call off the mission and go home. She probably wouldn't have, but each step would have been a conscious flouting of good sense.

Drawing a deep breath, she let the transformation come over her in full. She was the only one to fear now, and anything that didn't know that was about it learn. The shift in her senses brought out the life in the forest. Warm spots nestled in the ground cover revealed hidden mice. Those higher in the trees were chipmunks and squirrels. Erica turned a circle, feeling the leaves crunch under her feet and breathing the musk and taint left by the animals that had walked, defecated, and killed in the space around her.

Instinct guided her deeper in, past a raccoon scrabbling at the base of a tree and a deer family curled up asleep under a cluster of rocks.

The air grew thicker as she moved through the trees. A tingle of energy that played over her skin and pulsed through her body both intrigued and repulsed her. She wasn't wanted here, was supposed to _go away_. Grinning her fangs at anything that might be observing, she pressed on.

Each step became an effort of will through a space that showed no observable difference from the woods she had first entered, yet that bore nothing in common with it. The presence of other animals ceased, as did the songs of crickets and evening birds. The trees shook with a silent breeze that touched nothing else.

Her feet brought her to the stream. She skirted the bank, backtracking the flowing water, searching. With only starlight to see by, she moved slowly and testing her footing carefully. Though werewolf vision made it easier to see at night, the thick leaves overhead blotted out most of the ambient light and she couldn't get a good sense of how deeply the stream cut into the ground.

At last she found the boy, as she had known she would. He had slipped down the bank and sat half-submerged into the water, unconscious.

Alive.

She pulled him out, smelling as she did blood from fresh scrapes and a long gash down his back that she guessed he'd gotten when he slipped. He must have been chasing one of his friends: perhaps a friendly game of tag.

His pulse threaded weakly and his heart beat in slow thumps. "I've got you," she murmured, hefting him into her arms. "I've got you."

Holding him, she peered into the woods. Even her special eyes showed no sign of the boy's friends. "I've got him," she told them, anyway.

She thought she heard a faint giggle in response.

With ponderous steps she started the walk back. Where she'd had to fight to get in because she wasn't wanted, she had to fight harder to leave because the boy in her arms was. The air felt thicker, like she was trying to push through deep water rather than a rain-tracked night. Small hands she couldn't see grabbed at her and tried to hold her back. She shook herself free and kept going.

Carrying the boy back to the edge of the yard, she laid him down. On the far side of the property, a police car sat parked in the driveway. Its lights swirled. The car hadn't been there when she'd arrived and she hunkered next to the boy, one hand on his chest, while she contemplated whether to carry him all the way over or whether to trust that they could find him. One meant that she'd be questioned—her motives and story picked apart—and, if she was lucky, returned to Beacon Hills. The other could result in the boy's death, for real, before anyone else found him.

Throwing her head back, Erica howled, pouring out her frustration and longing.

The just arrived police officer was walking up the path to the front door of the boy's house. A light came on as he approached and the door swung open on stiff hinges. "Wolves?" she heard the officer say.

A shaky, teenage girl's voice answered, "Coyotes?"

A flashlight came on and swung her direction. It was still too far away to be a danger. Seeing the police officer veer toward the back yard, she called out in her human voice, "He's here!"

She turned and ran, ducking back into the trees and around, back toward the temporary safety of the diner.

By the time she got back, the burnt hamburgers had been scraped off the grill and thrown away. The fan on the stove had whisked away all but traces of the smoke and smell. New burgers had been cooked and plated. Stephanie set them on the counter just as Erica entered. The scent made Erica's mouth water and her step quickened to reach the promised food.

"Where did you go?" Stephanie asked with a glance toward the bathrooms. Boyd must have used them as his excuse, though what Erica would have been doing in there for so long—since diner bathrooms didn't have showers—she had no idea. Stephanie still looked a mess, though the distraction of dealing with the burgers had restored a sense of direction to her movements.

Erica smiled. "I found him. He's going to be fine."

Stephanie's mouth dropped open in shock. "Where is he?" She grabbed for Erica's hands. "Where's my son?" Her gaze searched Erica's face looking for a cruel joke or wrongful teasing. Finding only sincerity, she stepped back, her hands coming up to cover her mouth in shock.

"He's safe now," Erica answered. Saying the words out loud was a relief. If not for her gasps of exertion and the scent of the child on her body, she might have thought she'd made the whole thing up. "I left him with the police. They're taking care of him."

Clearing his throat, Boyd asked, "Can we get these to go?"

"God, yes. Of course," Stephanie replied. If she wondered why they were suddenly so eager to be on their way, she knew better than to ask. She pulled foam to-go containers from under the counter and dumped the burgers into them, then stuck the containers into a bag with handles. "I just have to know: How—Where did you find him?"

"In the forest," Erica answered. She tried to offer a disarming smile and stopped when she saw that Stephanie wasn't buying it. "He'd kinda gotten...lost." If getting trapped in a supernatural space qualified, Erica amended. "Maybe you should have the babysitter keep a better eye on him. I don't think his friends are going to be too happy that he had to stop playing with them."

"His friends?" She pushed the bag toward Boyd, then immediately pulled it back with a "wait" gesture. Seconds later, she'd added a half pie that had been cooling in the display next to the register, a half dozen muffins from the rack behind the counter, and a handful of napkins and plasticwear. "On the house," she added, handing the bag over.

Boyd accepted it with a grateful nod. Under his breath, he made a different entreaty that only Erica could hear: "Did you see the friends?"

Erica heard the real question: Did you see Alicia?

The possibility had crossed her mind, too. How could it not? Kids who vanished without a trace, who wandered off to play with imaginary friends and who never came home.

"No," she mouthed.

His face fell. The utter hopelessness she saw there seared her heart.

"Later," she promised quietly. When they were alone, she'd tell him the rest: how she'd felt the hands of children and heard the cadences of their pleas and laughter; how she'd been able to cross into where they played; and how she'd found the boy and brought him back across. Who knew how many children were still there to be found, and how many had been searching for a way home.

If Alicia could still be saved, she and Boyd would be the ones to do it.

He must have sensed what she was holding back because he hefted the bag with a sincere, "Thank you, ma'am."

"You saved my son," she answered, simply. "It's the least I could do."

Most other people wouldn't have been so generous, Erica knew. Some might even have tried to take further advantage of the runaway teens in front of them. She only hoped that Stephanie's generosity didn't get her in trouble.

Shoving all this aside, Erica continued, "Find your son some real friends. Imaginary ones have a way of disappearing when you need them the most." She thought briefly of Pumpkin Pie and how much more frightening the epilepsy tests had become she'd disappeared. Turning a smile on Boyd, she stood on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on his cheek. "Real ones are better."

From the shadow of the building across the street, Erica and Boyd watched the police officer arrive in the diner's parking lot. The car pulled up in silence and parked neatly between the painted lines on the street in front of the building.

The officer strode from his car with the gait of a person with urgent news to share. Stephanie met him at the door, wary expectation on her face, lit by the bright glow of the empty diner. She'd already removed her apron and held it bundled in her hands.

"Are you ready, Steph?" the officer asked. He extended his arm in invitation for her to follow him.

"Matt," she answered, with a nod of greeting. "Thank you for picking me up. He's going to be OK?" Stephanie asked. She switched off the lights, pulled the door shut behind her. The lock clicked in place.

Matt pushed his hat higher on his head. "They're just taking him to the hospital for observation," he assured her.

She'd already been told this when he'd first called with the news that he had found her son. The diner's owner called right after that with permission to shut down early, in view of the circumstances. The important news, and then the reassurance that she would not get fired for taking care of her family, brought a beautiful strength to the waitress.

As Matt escorted her to the car, he repeated, "He's gonna be fine. He got real lucky. Damned if I can figure out what happened, though. Someone rescued him, then took off before we could get an ID. You wouldn't know anything about that?" The question merely curious, no accusation in it at all.

Stephanie shook her head. "I've been here all night. Brenna's got me doing everything: waiting the tables, bussing, running the grill and the register. Not much business this late, but a job's a job."

"So you don't know anything about the good Samaritan?" Matt rubbed at the back of his neck, his confusion obvious.

Stephanie's eyes flicked to the booth where Erica and Boyd had been sitting, then out to the star-filled horizon. A new moon hung overhead, visible only because of a faint penumbra, and it was possible that she could see their silhouettes in the lines of the building, but probably not.

Erica's breath caught as she waited for the woman to point or give descriptions. She was not ready to go back to Beacon Hills yet. If that time came, then she wanted to do so under her own power, by her own choice—not at the hands of a well-meaning police officer who thought he was doing a good deed of reuniting the runaways with their parents.

A shrug and a shake of her head, Stephanie answered. "For all I know, it was angels."

The doors slammed shut and the police car pulled away, taking with it the continued conversation inside.

Erica and Boyd watched the last light on the street disappear and turned toward the edge of town.

"Are you sure you wanna do this?" Boyd asked, straightening his back and gathering his will in preparation for the long journey ahead. "I can go on by myself."

Erica nudged him with her shoulder. "You know I do. I wanted this, too. Not how I thought I was going to get it, but..." She trailed off, the scent of uneaten burgers reminding her that they'd left Beacon Hills without a plan or a direction, or even an articulated goal. Despite that, they'd still managed to stumble across exactly what they'd been looking for.

"It's not Disneyland."

"No," Erica responded, thoughtfully. "It's living."

The clouds had slipped away and the earlier rain had left the world smelling clean and damp. In front of them, the star-filled night opened up wide. Hand-in-hand they headed toward its promise.


End file.
